Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
Ernest BeckerRead
We might say that psychoanalysis revealed to us the complex penalties of denying the truth of man's condition, what we might call the costs of pretending not to be mad.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that ignoring our true mental state has serious consequences.
Ernest Becker highlights the inherent struggle of humanity to confront the uncomfortable truths about our existence. By denying our mental realities, we incur psychological penalties that can lead to distorted perceptions and behaviors, illustrating the importance of self-awareness and acceptance of our condition as human beings.
In practice
In a psychology class discussing the consequences of denial in mental health.
Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
The artist takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art.
When you confuse personal love and cosmic heroism you are bound to fail in both spheres. The impossibility of the heroism undermines the love, even if it is real. This double failure is what produces the sense of utter despair that we see in modern man... Love, then, is seen a religious problem
All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
If the love object is divine perfection, then one's own self is elevated by joining one's destiny to it... All our guilt, fear, and even our mortality itself can be purged in a perfect consummation with perfection itself.
Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.
Acceptance of one's life has nothing to do with resignation; it does not mean running away from the struggle. On the contrary, it means accepting it as it comes, with all the handicaps of heredity, of suffering, of psychological complexes and injustices.
All is disgust when a man leaves his own nature and does what is unfit.
He who floats with the current, who does not guide himself according to higher principles, who has no ideal, no convictions-such a man is . . . a thing moved, instead of a living and moving being-an echo, not a voice. The man who has no inner-life is a slave of his surroundings as the barometer is the obedient servant of the air.
When men are oppressed, it's a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it's tradition.
Patriotic feelings will surely swell, prompting proud proclamations of the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice shared by the Framers and reflected in a written document now yellowed with age . . . [F]or many Americans the bicentennial celebration will be little more than a blind pilgrimage to the shrine of the original document now stored in a vault in the National Archives. [Progressive]
If you're honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you're forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.